“Hey,” Megan said when her sister glanced over at them, struck again by how alike they looked. Slightly different coloring, Amber with darker hair and green eyes, but similar features that immediately marked them as sisters.
Even now it was still surreal to think of all that had happened to them, and everything that had led to now. They’d been separated when they were young, recruited into the top secret Valkyrie Program and sent to different training facilities on opposite sides of the country. Soon after that, they’d both been told the other had died.
Lies. One of many that had warped and twisted their lives.
Amber had almost destroyed the remaining Valkyries because of other lies. If Megan and two of the others hadn’t succeeded in finally capturing Amber on that op in Vienna, they never would have found each other, much less known the other was still alive.
Hatred hardened like a diamond inside her at the thought of all the years they’d been denied together. At the sheer toll in human suffering their psychotic aunt had caused when she’d started everything. The bitch was dead now, and Megan hoped she was burning in hell. “What’s going on? Your message sounded urgent.”
“Come take a look at this.” Amber rolled her chair aside, allowing Megan to come stand at the desk and view the center monitor.
Ty positioned himself just behind her, looking over her shoulder. And he smelled damn good, too, but now was not the time for distractions. “Who’s this from?” she asked, reading the message. It looked sort of like an email, but clearly wasn’t.
“No idea.”
Megan stopped reading to blink at her in surprise. Amber was a wizard with all things technical and electronic. She could crack anything. “None?”
“No,” she said in a flat tone, crossing her arms. “Lady Ada found it early this morning, otherwise I wouldn’t ever have known it existed. That alone tells me whoever sent it set this up expecting me to find it. The encryption on it was cutting edge. And even after I’d cracked that, I still had to run it through a bunch of my other programs because it was all in code.”
“Wow.” Megan scanned it again. The short paragraph read like an anonymous tip, about a kidnapping ring currently operating in the UK. Preying on women and possibly teenage girls.
“What do you make of it?” Ty asked Amber.
“I’m thinking it could be the same person who’s been trying to find us all. And they have at least some solid info on us, because guess who else was named in this message besides me?”
Megan and Ty both looked at her expectantly.
“Kiyomi.”
Cold spread through Megan as the significance of that registered. “So then…whoever sent this is somehow familiar with our recent activities.”
A few months ago Amber had begun doing pro bono work for organizations and law enforcement agencies specializing in hunting down human traffickers. Kiyomi had privately—and anonymously—been assisting and funding organizations dedicated to fighting the exploitation of orphaned girls across the globe, with an eye on starting her own foundation.
“Exactly.” Amber spun her swiveling chair around to face them. “Whoever sent this knows too damn much already, and I can’t find them.”
Unease began to take hold. Megan already hadn’t liked the feel of this before, when Amber had told her the other day that someone was relentlessly searching for them. This new bit was way worse.
“Any truth to the tip?” Ty asked.
“Yes.”
At that low response they all looked at Jesse, leaning against the doorframe with his ripped arms crossed over his broad chest. “Several news agencies in the UK have reported a possible kidnapping ring working there over the past few weeks. Seven women have gone missing so far, and one eighteen-year-old. I talked to Marcus about it an hour ago, and he confirmed everything we were able to find.”
Megan nodded, boiling it all down in her head. “All that aside, bottom line is, we’re dealing with a serious security breach.”
“Yep,” Amber answered, green eyes hard. “And I still can’t get a lead on whoever this ‘source’ is.”
Her constant companion, anxiety, began to bubble in the pit of her stomach. “What if it’s a trap?”
Amber stared at her with that same fixed expression. “Chances are good it is. What do you want to do about it?”
There was only one answer to give. “I think we need to bring the Valkyries out of retirement.”
Chapter Three
Arms folded across his chest, Marcus leaned against the bookcase on the back wall of his study and listened to the conversation happening. A few feet in front of him, Kiyomi was seated at his desk in his favorite leather chair, on a secure video chat with some of the Valkyries.
So far, he didn’t like what he was hearing.
Finding out that someone was relentlessly searching for Kiyomi was bad enough. What Amber had just disclosed prior to the meeting disturbed him even more.
“Any word yet on whether the cops think the missing women’s cases are linked?” Chloe asked.
As usual, the explosives expert was chomping away on some gum, her blond hair peeking out from under one of the baseball caps she favored. He couldn’t read her T-shirt, but he would bet Laidlaw Hall that whatever it said was full of some sarcastic cheek.
“Not officially,” Kiyomi answered. “However, everything Marcus and I have found on the cases so far suggests that the majority of them are probably linked in some way. Given the timeline, the backgrounds of the women and the area where most of them were taken, there’s a high likelihood we’re dealing with a professional kidnapping ring.” Her voice and expression were totally calm, giving nothing away about her feelings on the matter.
That didn’t mean shit, however. She had been trained to be calm in any situation, including capture and torture. The kidnappings and possible trafficking involved here infuriated her on the deepest level. Yet she acted like this new threat against her didn’t bother her.
Well, it sure as hell was bothering him.
There should be no further threat against her or any of the others. Amber had taken elaborate steps to scrub their identities and pasts from all government records, aided by former NSA agent Alex Rycroft, their unofficial government ally in their fight for freedom. Only a handful of people outside of this video chat should even know of their existence at this point, much less their names, intel on prior ops, or current interests and activities.
So even if Kiyomi might look calm, he knew his wife better than that. She might still be a mystery to him in some ways, but she couldn’t fool him with this. There was no way this hadn’t shaken her on a deep level. It was driving him bloody mad that she was trying to hide it from him.
“I’ve spliced together some local news coverage on the investigation over here,” she continued, and started a video feed for the others.
Marcus shifted his attention from his wife to the stories she’d edited together, detailing the recent disappearances, and the police force’s frustration with having no solid leads.
Over the past seven weeks, eight women had gone missing from the Birmingham area. All different ages, different ethnic backgrounds, none of them subscribing to a specific “type.” The likelihood that they were all victims of this same kidnapping ring was high.